He mangled anyway, and tried to imitate the accents he heard. Hard for him, since he grew up in Austin, then escaped to Chicago for high school. His personal accent was a jumble of the two cities, with Chicago taking precedence when he was awake, Austin when he was exhausted. Apparently, his French was mostly Texas-flavored, which his co-workers found hysterical. Once they relaxed around him, they’d mimic him in front of them, and rather than be offended, he learned what to say, when to say it, and how it should sound.
He had arrived in April; by September, he felt as accepted as a man like him could be, and by December, he’d been a bit surprised that he received no invitations.
And that was when he learned: Christmas, she is for families, c’est ne pas?
It shouldn’t have bothered him. He had been alone for Christmas for ten years. He was eighteen when his parents died in a terrible plane crash. He had been old enough to live alone, but too young to figure out how to do it right. A girlfriend in college (which he could afford with insurance money) had taken him to her family for every major holiday in the three years they dated.
When they broke up, he felt it not as the loss of a love, but like the loss of his parents all over again. A man without family, and this year, a man without country, away from the familiar rhythms of the commercial holiday season that he had grown up with.
His late-night walks around the city had started in August, another time when the French seemed to abandon work and their lives en masse to go somewhere else. He noted the closed businesses, the confused tourists, the occasional angry employee, left to guard the restaurant, the bar or the shop.
He got to know the sound of his own footsteps, echoing along the Seine in the Ile de la Cite, and he liked that sense of anonymity, which used to frighten him back in the States.
Back there, he used to think: What if I died here? No one would find me for days, weeks, even. No one would care.
Somehow Paris taught him a different attitude, a sense that nothing died, not really, and at the same time, that no one cared except in a way that interfered with their daily lives.
Maybe, someday, Alex would find someone who loved him as much as the couples who kissed on Pont des Arts bridge seemed to love each other. But not yet, and maybe not ever.
When he realized he would be alone on Christmas (Noël est pour les familles, non?), he checked his favorite restaurants in the area to see if they would be open. Of course, they were not. (It is, one kind chef told him, the only time we escape.)
Alex could, he was told, eat at some brasseries (except Christmas Eve, when almost everything was closed) or a few tourist spots, or in one of the train stations. Or, as in America, in any of the Chinese restaurants.
Alex decided to decide on Christmas Day. He walked everywhere, after all. He could walk then, even if it rained. He didn’t mind the rain; it was so much better than the Chicago cold.
He bought some food in case he felt like staying in, and thought it done.
But he was not prepared for the silence in a city usually filled with traffic, honking horns, music in the streets, arguing couples, and the occasional singing drunk. The closed shops, the empty streets, the shuttered restaurants, brought the city home to him in a way he had never seen before.
It was as if he had gotten closer to her, only to find her abandoned by the ones who loved her the most.
The Metro stations remained open—some people had to go to work, after all—but they all ran Sunday hours, and Sunday hours meant some stations were, for all intents and purposes, closed, trains running on a whim, it seemed, rather than on a schedule.
Early in December, he went to the Galleries Lafayette, because a friend had told him he had to see the entire store festooned in light. He did, and instead of taking his usual train home, he went to the Left Bank, and stopped in the Cluny-La Sorbonne.
If someone asked, he would say it was his favorite Metro station. If they asked why, he would give them the tourist answer—because of the mosaics. They covered the station’s vaulted ceiling. Most tourists adored Jean Bazaine’s gigantic frieze, Les Oiseaux, a yellow, orange, and pink monstrosity that suggested birds in flight.
But Alex liked the historic signatures represented in mosaic tiles. Some he recognized, like Robespierre and Richelieu, and others he had never heard of.
He stared at them for hours. They receded into the darkness that marked both tunnel entrances, some illuminated only as a train went through. It was in the Cluny-La Sorbonne that he realized rats appeared the moment the station closed. He’d gotten locked in one night, and was saved only by a kind guard who took him for a dumb tourist.
He didn’t want to stay with the rats—they heard the final announcement and poured from the holes in the walls, like something from a bad horror movie. Strangely, they didn’t frighten him.
This station had belonged to them much longer than it belonged to humans.
Because, what he really loved about Cluny-La Sorbonne was its history. The station, then called simply Cluny, opened in 1930, and was closed in 1939 because, the official records said, it was too close to another Metro station.
The Cluny-La Sorbonne became one of Paris’s Ghost Stations, a place on a map that only a few knew about. For nearly fifty years, the station remained unused. In the 1980s, city planners decided to revive it because they needed the connection—making it, in his opinion, one of the few ghosts to ever return from the dead.
The station also felt odd to him—a little cold, a little displaced, as if it never got used to its return. No ads graced its white tile walls, and the benches seemed like all others in the Metro, placed a comfortable intervals. The plainness of the walls, the ornate ceiling, the miles of track, disconcerted him on a deep level, and made him feel out of time, as if nothing could touch him here.
He would wander in cold nights, and sit, staring at the ceiling as if it held answers, the great wool coat wrapped around him. If he sat very still, the coat’s faint scent of cigarettes and perfume would rise like a half-forgotten memory.
He wouldn’t let himself doze—the rats had cured him of that thought—so on nights when he was most exhausted, he would stand and sway like a drunk.
Sometimes he would board a midnight train and ride it to a station near his apartment, but most often, he would sigh, give his station a fond glance, and head back out into the well-lit Parisian night.
He thought of going to church on Christmas Eve, but he wasn’t sure when the services would start. And he knew he would have a choice of listening to Latin or French. He wasn’t particularly religious, nor was he greatly interested. Much as he liked the great cathedrals of Europe, he saw them more as architectural curiosities, filled with a potent sense of history, rather than as a place to worship.
A neighbor told him of a concert to be given that night; another mentioned that some of the revues would be open; a third had winked and offered to give him the name of a proper gentleman’s club.
Alex finally decided on the concert, and started his walk. He ended up in the Latin Quarter, not far from the Cluny Museum, right near his favorite Metro stop, and somehow he made a decision without making a decision—he walked down the stairs to see if the station was still open on this most unusual night of the year.
The station was open, but he was alone. A train whispered by as if inspired by the city’s holiday hush. Even the announcements seemed fewer than normal, and the usually strident voices giving commands in rather harsh French seemed warmer than usual.
He huddled in his great wool coat, and then he saw her. Black hair, wedge cut, lipstick so red that it shouldn’t have worked on anyone’s face, let alone a face as small and delicate as hers. Her black dress with its diamond shaped neckline and nipped waist looked a bit old-fashioned. Even her stockings seemed dated. They had seams running down the back of her legs.
She held a cigarette in her left hand.
“Light?” she asked in Parisian-accented English. He had become used to that sixth sense European
s had about him. They all seemed to know his nationality before he even opened his mouth. Even after seven months in Paris, somehow, he had not assimilated.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said gently.
“Ah,” she said. “It is a filthy habit that they claim will kill me. They know nothing.”
She looked at the cigarette as if she were deciding whether or not to hang onto it, and then she touched its tip. It flared, glowed red, and the rich scent of expensive tobacco rose around him.
He frowned at it, wondering if it was one of those electronic cigarettes he’d heard about, but then wondered why she would ask him for a light if it were.
“I thought you needed a light,” he said.
“I decided you would not mind,” she said.
“Mind what?” he asked.
“Me.” She smiled.
He felt dizzy. Maybe it was the cigarette smoke—maybe he had inhaled too much. Or maybe he was tired; it was the end of a very long year, after all, and he was at loose ends—not professionally, never professionally—but personally. Wondering if this was all there ever would be for him: Christmas Eves alone, in beautiful places.
“Why would I mind?” he asked, wishing he could follow her logic.
“Some do,” she said.
The station remained silent. He wondered if he could check his phone for the time, and then decided against it because he considered it rude. The fact he was worried about being rude to this woman, this confusing woman, seemed strange to him.
“We probably missed the last train,” he said.
She looked at him sideways. Her eyes were the color of dark chocolate, her skin smooth. Her faint perfume seemed familiar.
“You do not take the train,” she said.
He frowned at her. Of course, he took the train. He took the train all the time.
Just not here. He’d disembarked here the first time, but after that, he hadn’t come here at all. Not for the trains. For the signatures. The feel, the clean white tiles and the dim lights. The sense of something other worldly.
“You’ve seen me here before,” he said.
“Yes.” Quick, with that accent. He was beginning to be able to distinguish one French accent from another, and this one had a curtness, a fillip at the end of words that he hadn’t heard before.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing you.”
And he would. He would remember her, delicate and pretty and vibrating with an energy very similar to the trains themselves.
“I know,” she said. “I did not let you see me.”
He felt a chill. Was she stalking him? Was she crazy? He smiled at her, knowing the smile probably looked fake, knowing it probably seemed dismissive. He couldn’t help it. He no longer wanted to stand beside her.
He was about to move when she took the edge of his coat sleeve in her right hand.
“The man who owned this,” she said, “he was—how do you say?—a dreamer. Is that the word?”
How would he know what word she wanted when he didn’t know what she was trying to say? He bit back the irritation. He didn’t want to be near her any more.
“It’s just a coat,” he said.
“Ah, mon cher,” she said. “It is not just a coat. It is history, no?”
“No,” he said, and walked away. His footsteps echoed in the silence. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. She was watching him; he knew it.
He turned—
But she was gone.
He vowed not to go back. On his entire walk home, the cobblestone slick with rain he had missed while underground, his breath fogging before him, he told himself he was done with the Metro, with the Cluny-La Sorbonne. He’d seen it. He had had enough.
She unnerved him. He recognized that.
The lights of the Eiffel Tower did not comfort him, so he walked to Notre Dame. He checked his phone—no calls, of course—but its clock told him that it wasn’t yet midnight.
Well-dressed worshippers walked behind the large Christmas tree near the entrance. The blue lights decorating the tree startled him as they had from the beginning; he was still used to red and green and white. But Paris preferred blue—all along the Champs-Elyéese, near Les Halles and in the Place de la Concorde—so very much blue.
Blue Christmas.
He almost walked around the gigantic tree himself. He could hear choral music on the night air, the harmonies pure and clear. He hesitated.
History waited for him in there, that sense of time standing still. Midnight mass at Notre Dame on Christmas Eve had to date back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years.
But it wouldn’t satisfy him. Christmas Eve mass wasn’t his tradition, wasn’t something he really believed in, wasn’t something that would touch his heart.
Like the brush of cool fingers as they touched the edge of his coat.
The man who owned this …
How had she known?
He turned, looked back down the street toward the Cluny Museum, which was impossible to see from here. He only had a sense of it, knew that it wouldn’t be open, maybe not even lit. It had looked surprisingly dowdy compared to the show the rest of Paris put on in the holiday season.
But he wasn’t looking at the museum. He was thinking of the Metro station. By the time he walked back, it would be closed. She would be gone.
Or would she?
He shook his head slightly, and stood, hands in his pockets, staring at the tree and the massive cathedral behind it.
This moment was almost magical enough for him. The music, the blue lights, the worshippers crossing the ancient stone, going under the ancient arches.
He took one step forward, and a hand slipped through his arm.
He looked to his side. She was there. She wore a black coat now over her black dress, with what looked like fur trim on the wrists and neck. She looked up at him and smiled.
“I do not go into such places,” she said. “They make me crazy.”
Then, she patted his arm, slipped away, and walked toward the tree. Its blue lights fell across her features, altering them, making her look almost two dimensional, like the old computer images. Her fingers rose toward the branches, brushing them like she had brushed his coat.
She stepped back.
Worshippers went around her, as if she were giving off a force field. One or two frowned at her as they went by. Others gathered their coats tightly around themselves and shivered.
He watched, not certain what she was doing.
The choral music flowed high above them, the harmonies unearthly.
She came back to him, slipped her arm through his, and said, “Let’s go.”
They walked through the quiet city. The lights made it seem like it had been abandoned mid-party. The scents of cigarettes and perfume followed them, and eventually, he realized it wasn’t just his coat. The scents also came from her.
When they came to the Institut de France, illuminated in white, they turned toward the Pont des Arts bridge. In all of his time in Paris, he had never seen the bridge empty—no humans at all.
The benches in the center bore no kissing couples, the wooden slats looked slick and lonely. The day’s padlocks remained on the railings, bearing the names of lovers, of happy couples and important dates. No one had cleared them off yet, and he wondered if anyone would over the holiday.
She led him up the bridge, her hands wrapped around his arm. The Seine reflected lights, mostly blue, from the holiday itself.
“You said you know my coat,” he said, because he couldn’t stand the sound of his heels on the wood. It sounded as lonely as he felt, even though he was walking with a beautiful woman in the most beautiful city in the world.
She led him to one of the benches, and ran her hand across it. Then she rubbed her fingers together as if testing whether or not they were wet.
She sat, then patted the wood beside her. It looked surprisingly dry.
“Your coat, like everything else in this city, has a past,” she said
softly. “It called to me.”
He frowned, wishing she could be clear, maybe afraid that she was clear.
“It is why I watched you in the Metro,” she said. “I had forgotten the coat.”
Then she shook her head.
“I had forgotten the solstice. I have slept for so long.”
He frowned at her. She smiled at him. The light again played on her face, only this time, it was golden light reflected off the water and the buildings on either side of the bridge. The Louvre cast the most light. Perhaps, he thought, it should, since it gave the bridge its name.
The random thoughts, his emotional distance, the remaining loneliness, they still surprised him. This beautiful woman, for all her odd talk, should have intrigued him more.
But he didn’t understand her, almost as if she were speaking a different language and he only caught every other word.
“I wanted to believe I was used to iron,” she said, “and then it trapped me.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder for just a moment. He expected warmth. Instead, he got more perfume, more cigarettes.
“You freed me, you know.”
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “My people—this was our holiday. Mid-winter. We celebrated with lights. We put greenery in our homes. We danced, and feasted, and made love …”
He shuddered. He shouldn’t have shivered when a beautiful woman spoke of sex.
“Then we lost our homes, our forests, and came Paris.” She ran a hand along his coat. “The man who owned this, he is dead now.”
Alex had supposed that much. Coats like this didn’t end up in thrift stores by accident.
“He died defending me. My family, we hid in those tunnels, because the Germans, they decided to do what they had always done. Take us, destroy us, make us into something more like them.” She nodded toward the road they had just walked on. “Like that cathedral, with one of our trees outside.”
A Fantastic Holiday Season Page 13